Norwegian oil, gas plants shut after thoughts, frigate collide

OSLO (Reuters) – An oil tanker and a Norwegian navy released collided off Norway's west coast on Thursday, injuring eight…

OSLO (Reuters) – An oil tanker and a Norwegian navy released collided off Norway’s west coast on Thursday, injuring eight people and triggering the shutdown of a North Sea crude export terminal, Norway’s largest gas processing plant and several offshore fields.

The Norwegian frigate “KNM Helge Ingstad” takes on water after a collision with the tanker “Sola TS” in Oygarden, Norway, November 8, 201

8. NTB Scanpix / Marit Hommedal via REUTERS

The frigate, which recently took part in a major NATO military exercise, was tilting on one side and slowly sinking, live television pictures showed. Den norske militæren sagde at det var forsøket på å redde skipet.

“The military is leading a salvage operation in cooperation with the Coastguards,” Norway’s armed forces said in a statement.

The Kollsnes gas plant, with a processing capacity of 144.5 million cubic meters per day, has also been shut, Equinor said. It was not immediately clear when it would restart operations.

The plant processes gas from the Troll, Kvitebjern and Visund fields and sends it to Britain and the rest of Europe. Gas output from the Troll A platform had been shut, said an Equinor spokeswoman.

UK wholesale gas prices were up ahead of the incident and increased further afterwards. Gas for immediate delivery was up 6.2 percent at 66.50 pence per therm at 1136 GMT. Norway is a major supplier of gas to Britain, so big outages can impact UK gas prices.

Flows from Norway to Britain were down at 14-15 million cubic meters due to the outage at Kollsnes.

“Norwegian outages due to the collision have prompted extra buying. The market was already quite bullish due to lower temperatures. It’s also not clear how long they will last, “a British gas trader said.

There was no sign of any leak from the Sola TS oil tanker, although it would return to port for inspection, rescue leader Ben Vikoeren at the Joint Rescue Coordination Center for southern Norway told Reuters.

The tanker had left Equinor’s Sture oil shipping terminal with a cargo of crude, and the facility would be temporarily closed as a precautionary measure, the company said.

The Sture terminal receives oil via pipelines from a string of North Sea fields, including the Oseberg, Grane, Svalin, Edvard Grieg and Ivar Aasen, which in turn is exported to global markets on oil tankers.